Emerging Trends in Flow Chemistry and Applications to the Pharmaceutical Industry

The field of flow chemistry has garnered considerable attention over the past 2 decades. This Perspective highlights many recent advances in the field of flow chemistry and discusses applications to the pharmaceutical industry, from discovery to manufacturing. From a synthetic perspective, a number of new enabling technologies are providing more rationale to run reactions in flow over batch techniques. Additionally, highly automated flow synthesis platforms have been developed with broad applicability across the pharmaceutical industry, ranging from advancing medicinal chemistry programs to self-optimizing synthetic routes. A combination of simplified and automated systems is discussed, demonstrating how flow chemistry solutions can be tailored to fit the specific needs of a project.